People Twitter

Also the Internet wasn't crapped up with every moron imaginable that could pick up a phone. There was a minimum barrier to entry; you needed a computer and to have at least average intelligence to figure out how to use it.

Logging off? Perhaps. I was on dialup a lot longer than most people I know, but for me, it’s the ad-driven surveillance capitalism and ever present grift of everyone seeking to monetize their interactions that didn’t exist back then.

Fuck that, I'm nostalgic because there was an actual aesthetic with character. "Modern" flat UIs are boring and flat.

No, I lived on the Internet it was my connection out of a small town into the wider world.

What’s making the Internet shit was capitalism monetising everything and making us a product just to use it.

Really, because I'm more nostalgic for having hope for the future.

lol I’ve been perpetually online from the beginningish.

People used to have social lives and meet and make friends and go out before apps or broadband. In the dialup days the internet was an addition to an already completed life. Facebook and iPhone was where things started to go to shit. Suddenly everyone was permanently online instead of just the cool people. And their brains all went to mush and they forgot how to relate to other people and have a life.

Some of y'all need to go camping more.

That said the 'old' Internet had a much better signal to noise ratio before the eternal September.

Very poetic but that was absolutely not what made the internet great. It was the culture and content. Everyone was just excited to make and share things with this cool tech.

I could only get AOL in my town back in 1995 or so. Back then you had to pay… by the hour? The minute? Something like that. And AOL wasn’t a 24 hour service, it would shut down each night and kick everyone off.

I almost cried reading the explanation.

Well put. Also it was novel and less sinister.

With Prodigy Internet, you get on, you get the information you need, and you go do something with it.

The other part was you could see what people were up to and behave accordingly. Someone could be offline or busy so you'd know if you'd get a response or if you should or shouldn't talk to them.

Now if it's 1am I hesitate to message people since it might wake them up or something.

I've been considering getting rid of my mobile data for this reason and force people to call or text.

For the majority of people the internet used to be a room, a place you went and accessed a device.

The device wasn’t mobile, we usually didn’t carry around the thick laptops of the time around.

At first using the device would disconnect the phone, and you couldn’t carry it around easily.

As times changed and it’s mobility shifted it became more and more commercially viable and then it was invaded by corporate interests.

Now it’s not just a room, it’s everywhere and it’s allows all sorts of powerful groups to exert influence over every single person that connects with it

Personally I thought the internet was better before it existed. 😁

ASL?